Pink Car Nation. (And a pick-up truck).

This is an unreliable memoir of early travels
in the USA from an unreliable author. The events below all happened a long time
ago and my memory of them is partial and uneven. In fact, it's probably best to
not pay any attention to it at all. Any names used are false and any similarity
to real life is purely accidental. The first two parts of this can be found
here on bebee.com.

Alice’s parents turned out not to be homicidal psychopaths.
They were nice and friendly and didn’t welcome me to the family homestead with
a shotgun and a warning to stay away from their daughter. They did put me up on
a folding bed in the basement however so it wasn't entirely certain that they
wouldn’t imprison me there forever if I transgressed in some way. Fortunately,
this did not come to pass.

Trenton was a suburban town in downriver Detroit. A mix of
white and blue collar commuters who laboured on factory floors and offices
working for the large carmakers, power plants and engineering companies in the
area. The riverside location played host to a mix of parkland, old industry,
watersports enthusiasts and anglers.

Apart from George and Barbara Bush who lived there for a
couple of months in 1945, Trenton was home to no famous people and pretty much
nothing of interest had ever happened locally in the entire history of the
republic. People went to work. People came home. People did stuff on the weekends.
As far as I was concerned though it was brilliant. Trenton had supermarkets
like Kroger and Meijer that were open twenty four hours a day and that sold
hundreds of different kinds of breakfast cereal as well as a dazzling array of
firearms. For insomniacs in need of chocolate krispies and a hunting rifle at
two in the morning it was nothing less than wondrous.

I used to love just
wandering around in a kind of consumer daze learning about all sorts of crappy
food I hadn’t previously required or known existed. My big find was “Pop
Tarts”, cardboard-like pastry filled with rubbishy jam and topped with sugar
frosting that was swept off the floor of a cement factory. You stick them in
the toaster and after a few minutes they pop up and now they taste like
hot cardboard filled with crappy jam and topped with cement. These were unheard
of in the UK at the time and for some reason that I can’t now explain they were
a huge favourite of mine. Possibly I liked them because my inner six year old
loved the idea of breakfast being a poorly disguised cake.

Whenever there was
an opportunity to go to a supermarket late at night I would volunteer to help
and aimlessly wander the aisles. Soon no-one wanted to go to the shops with
me because the time it took to find me again was out of all proportion to the
time it took to buy milk and go home. People started keeping me in sight just
as you would a small child. I was probably only one random, retail detour
away from being put on a rein.

Detroit

Detroit was a real eye opener. Not long after arriving I
saw a sign indicating that I was on Telegraph road and felt a small glow of
pleasure as I drove down a location from a Dire Straits album. Apart from this
one familiar road sign though pretty much everything else was unfamiliar to a
boy from a small rural village.

I had been nowhere like Detroit. I had seen nowhere like Detroit.

The Renaissance centre, Greektown and the business heart of
the city was skyscrapers, monorail and bustling modern town. Just a couple of
streets away though whole areas of buildings had fallen in to complete ruin. Prosperity
and poverty co-existed literally side by side. Housing and industrial premises
lay in piles of rubble where they had fallen and this was so normal that nobody
even noticed. I walked down streets where the erect, inhabited buildings were
in the minority and dereliction the order of the day. I just couldn’t
understand how things ever reached such a state.

It reminded me of nothing more
nor less than pictures of London and other cities in the aftermath of second
world war bombing raids but those older scenes made more sense to me. At least
back then someone was actively trying to bomb the place to the ground. Detroit
looked to be achieving something similar through the use of political and
economic policy. Every day my local paper of choice, the Detroit Free Press or
occasionally the Detroit News, seemed to wheel out a new list of layoffs and closures
or imminent closures involving local manufacturers. These would be joined by
stories about crises at all levels of local government be it Detroit city,
Wayne county or Michigan state. The whole area seemed to lurch from one disaster
to another with barely a pause between episodes. Meanwhile, every day, the people
went to work, came home and did stuff on the weekends and while I admired their
stoicism, I did wonder how Normal evolves into perpetual Chaos.

For me however this was all background noise and easily
ignored as I carried on in my personal, tourist gawker bubble. A highlight of
this time was a visit to Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford museum in
Dearborn. For a man who said that “History is more or less bunk” old Henry
certainly put a lot of time, effort and money into preserving and cataloguing
it.

The site is immense and is filled with far too much stuff to get through in
any single visit. Greenfield Village is an outdoor collection of the houses and
workshops of the famous creatives who helped make America such an industrial
powerhouse. Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park labs are here as is the Wright Brothers
bicycle shop and the Firestone family farm among many others. Not
reconstructions mind but the actual premises. Moved in their entirety and
rebuilt, brick by painstaking brick, here in Mid-Michigan. The collection
doesn’t just include the main building but often the living quarters and staff
accommodation as well.

It’s extremely well done albeit a little surreal. After
a very short while I started to forget that this is a confection of a village and
imagined Edison storming over to the Wright’s place to complain about getting
yet another puncture. The Wrights could claim that it was all Harvey Firestone’s
fault because he was making terrible rubber and they could all call on Abraham
Lincoln to mediate and settle the resulting dispute, etcetera, etcetera.

Inside, the museum was no less awesome, with endless
exhibits of timeless Americana. Unsurprisingly, there are an awful lot of cars
with a real emphasis on the glory days of the American motor industry. It isn’t
just automobiles though. The place is absolutely crammed with all manner of
stuff and just like the outdoor village they have pulled in lots of things
which were a part of the history and culture of the nation. Some of it didn’t resonate with a tourist just
off the plane but it certainly had an effect on my companions. One thing which
is a more recent addition since then is the bus in which Rosa Parks refused to
give up her seat. The actual, real life, public omnibus from Montgomery and the
pages of my school history book. Just sitting there in the museum and
beautifully restored. That alone would make a return trip worth my while. The list
of interesting, important or remarkable things on display just went on and on. There
didn’t seem to be any particular order and the random serendipity of it all
only added to the pleasure. It seemed that we were on more of a treasure hunt
than a museum tour. If you ever find yourself within several hundred miles of
the place I would thoroughly recommend driving in for a visit.

With accommodation onsite you could probably spend days
wandering around without repeating yourself or needing to leave the premises.
We strolled happily out at closing time and journeyed back to Trenton, stopping
for dinner at a Chinese restaurant en-route. As I watched the lights of the
city go by in the dark it seemed like I was a very long way from home indeed. And
that fact was just fine by me.

Lake
Michigan

For all manner of reasons Alice wasn’t getting on well with
her parents at this point. As usual with my complete lack of awareness and no
shortage of distractions, I missed quite a lot of the tension in the air but
even a bumbling idiot could spot the obvious on occasion. She was going to
return to East Lansing and university at the end of Summer but with tempers stretched, already the end of summer felt like a long way away.

Somehow, we ended up planning to spend a week or two out of
town. Camping and cycling around the North Western part of the state and seeing
somewhere a bit different. I don’t know who had the idea first but Alice’s
parents were certainly happy enough to lend us a car for an unspecified amount
of time while we went off on our own. This was to me just another sign that
America was different. When I turned seventeen years old and became eligible
for a provisional driving licence it very quickly became clear that my dad was
as likely to lend me his kidney as his car. Cars were things that people,
especially sons, just didn’t get to borrow yet here in Michigan folks clearly
just passed vehicles around to anyone. It was a very John Hughes moment and I
loved that America was turning out to be just like the movies.

We headed towards Traverse city intending to explore some
of the Lake Michigan shoreline, Sleeping Bear Dunes and the Leelanau peninsula.
I had a borrowed bike, we could take all the time we wanted and we had not a
care in the world. Life was pretty good. We avoided bigger towns as they were
busy but once off the beaten track the people just melted away and we hardly
saw a soul. The small town of Lake Ann was utterly deserted and we paused only
briefly before pedalling on. There was a general store which was closed and
some houses but no sign of any human inhabitants. Not for the last time I was
struck by how few people live in this enormous land. We camped by beaches, in
forests and in quiet campsites. The roads were empty and the scenery was lovely
and every so often we would round a bend and the view out over the water would
open up before us.

It has been said many times before but the Great Lakes of
North America are an incredible sight to behold. Camping by a beach and looking
out over the vast expanse of water that is Lake Michigan it was impossible for
me to think of it as anything other than oceanic. Prior to this I had always
kind of assumed that the “lakeness” of the lake would be obvious to the most
casual onlooker but even looking across the narrowest point to Wisconsin there
was no indication that a neighbouring state lay just beyond my view over the
“Sea”. I was always surprised on jumping in that the water was fresh. Then,
after a few days I was surprised that I was still surprised but, in all honesty,
it would probably be just as surprising today. It really is a hugely impressive
stretch of fresh water.

Cycle trip over we returned to the car and retraced our
steps back to Trenton. The break seemed to have cleared the air back home well
enough. We survived the summer without any major frostiness and Alice and I got
ready to relocate to East Lansing. Home of Michigan State University, El Azteco
Mexican restaurant and an environmentally friendly way for me to earn money
legally.

There will be further instalments of this story as I
excavate the dustier corners of my memory and make time at the keyboard. If you
are new to this the links to the earlier pieces are at the top of the page and
here;

If you liked this then please share it. I always appreciate
when people pass these articles on in their social networks or with likeminded
friends and colleagues. Comment of course, is always welcome. All my public
writing; personal or work related is available here on Bebee.com.

#8 I don't think I've actually eaten a PopTart since elementary school. Loved 'em back then. Maybe, like cigarettes, you have to get hooked young, otherwise, you can't imagine why anyone would ever touch the stuff!

#7 Only almost? At some point in time kellogs introduced pop tarts to the UK and I bought a box. It was like meeting an old flame who had gone downhill badly. I didn't know what I'd been thinking. But hey we all have these teenage infatuations, don't we? 😂 I think I'd struggle to eat one now if I was paid.

#5 Thanks @Franci🐝Eugenia Hoffman, beBee Brand Ambassador. As I write these stories it has bred an urge to go back and see these places again from a different point in my life. The last time I was over was a family visit in the mid nineties but this place and that time had such a huge influence on my life that it seems odd to me now that I haven't been back in such a long time. Michigan was like a gateway to another world and it seems that I still have the urge to pack up one day and walk through the gateway again. Perhaps this time as a more organised and responsible adult. ?? :-)

Wow, love this post @Neil Smith! It's been eons since I've been in Detroit and I remember it being an awesome city. Memories of the automotive industry is a crowd pleaser and the Great Lakes are, as you say an incredible sight to behold.